When I was a child, I used to get afraid of ghosts. People in villages
often tell many stories about them. They say that in a particular tree of this
or that area, or this or that bush, there lives an evil ghost, or a benevolent one.
When dusk falls, when the day hastens to become night and trees get silhouetted
against the sky, the vision of dark trees getting darker on the horizon used to
filter a ghostly feeling in me.
It is said that during night-time, some even heard, in a particular tree, the moaning cry of a ghost turned so because the person whose ghost it was had died an unnatural death by committing suicide. I could not go through such an area, because of fear.
Even if I went through such a place with my elders at night, I used to grab them by my hands, lest a ghost or two jump at me from the nearby bush. Later when I grew a little bit older, I learnt to dismiss ghosts as mere superstitions like others. I used to taunt those who still believed in them. I became so courageous – not without fear of course! – that I could stay, like Srikanta of Sharatchandra Chattyopadhya, in the dark village graveyard with numerous unknown sounds of insects at night, betting with my boyhood friends, who still could believe that ghosts existed. My fear in the grave-yard was, however, generated by the poisonous reptiles and insects. The village graveyards were so bushy with numerous holes!
Prince Hamlet of Shakespeare had also seen a ghost, his father’s ghost, at the palace. His father was killed by his uncle who afterwards married the queen, now a widow, Hamlet’s mother. The ghost of Hamlet’s father enjoined the shocked and grieving prince to take revenge upon his killer brother who had unjustly captured the throne and married his wife.
Well, in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare could use such supernatural machinery, because then, the Shakespeare scholars have found, people still used to believe in ghosts. A modern reader of Hamlet, very justifiably, may find it difficult to accept this supernatural scene in the play. But to me, the scene does not appear unrealistic, if not rational. I don’t call the scene irrational either. There are many things that happen in the world which our rational mind is incapable of explaining. They are ever shrouded in mysteries. The ghost sighting scene in Hamlet and the madness of Hamlet later in the play have a sound psychological as well as spiritual basis. And human psychology and the world of spirituality are so unfathomable that our rational mind only touches the surface of them, cannot reach the deepest deep of the matter. Freudian critics have tried to explain the case of Hamlet, but I think they have not succeeded.
No, still I don’t believe in those stories of ghosts, that I used to hear
during my child hood. I still reject those stories as mere super stations. But
I am inclined to believe, or rather I am forced to believe, that ghosts and
spirits exist, in the world beyond the natural and temporal, the world unknown
shrouded in mystery, a holy mystery inviolable and unfathomable. And why? You
are a ghost standing there or walking there in your flesh and bones. The ghosts
inside you are commanding you to do this, don’t do that. Yours may be a ‘good’
ghost or an ‘evil’ ghost, a harmless ghost or a harmful ghost. The very ‘you’
is your ghost, the very ‘I’ is my ghost, and ‘we’ are our ghosts.
Mystically transformed, - indeed it is mystically there from time immemorial – this daily and mundane world of ours turns into a world of spirituality, a noble creation of Allah, for a definite and set purpose.
To many an intellectual, both of the east and the west, religion has
become some sort of superstition nowadays, and rejecting religion – as I
rejected the childhood stories of ghosts – has become a fashion to them, who
are working as forces of disintegration, both at the individual as well as
social levels. It is time to exorcise bad ghosts from the wrappings of bones
and flesh.
